Hacker News Reader

> LLMs by design are not capable of reason.

This isn't true.

A deep neural network certainly can emulate the logical functions we think of as "reasoning" (ie, AND/OR/XOR functions).

See for example:

https://cprimozic.net/blog/boolean-logic-with-neural-network...

https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~axgao/cs486686_f21/lecture_notes...

https://towardsdatascience.com/emulating-logical-gates-with-...

https://medium.com/@stanleydukor/neural-representation-of-an...

View on HN

What an odd comment. Would you assert also that an 8080 is "capable of reason"?

Usually when people are saying "LLMs can't reason" they are claiming they are unable to do logical inference (although the claims are often quite hard to pin down to something specific).

Yes, an 8080 is capable of reasoning. Prolog runs well, see for example: https://medium.com/@kenichisasagawa/exploring-the-wonders-of...

I would say integrated circuits in general are not incapable of reason by design, even if some examples may be. Somehow a bunch of meat and fat is capable of reason, even if my steak isn't.

There’s a lot of negated negatives in that sentence.

One might say parsing it is a good example of logical inference which is what I think most people mean when they say “reasoning”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com